It’s for people with more money than brains.

When people may get into a competitive game, data shows that they commit to it as their primary game.

It becomes a part of their identity. You see things like Leage of Legends going strong despite a slow down in new players - people just commit to it for better or for worse, likely because most of the skills they’ve gained in it and friends they’ve made will not transfer to other games. Even other FPS games have different nuances that are non trivial once a player becomes serious about winning.

Take Wild Rift vs Mobile Legends Bang Bang. MLBB is objectively a worse rip off of League of Legends and the Chinese game Glory of Kings, but it was first to market on mobile. Now that League has released their mobile version with immense polish and quality, many mobile moba gamers just aren’t interested - they’re already totally invested in their main game, despite it being proved in court that it’s a cheap copy. (Not cheap as in $$$ though)

When you’re a kid, spending time on any competitive game will be fun (if you can handle the baseline toxicity) since you will start bad at most of them. When you get older there is a real cost to switching, you will not have as much fun until you build up the years of muscle memory that would be needed to even approach your skill at the previous game.

Because of the lock in, if a competitive game finds a sizeable enough player base and lasts a good handful of years, the devs essentially get free rein to milk their cow as they see fit.

You don’t. You play single player games like me and get to experience cool stories instead of dopamine lacking rage inducing PvP games.

Some dudes seem to be required to buy every COD game and every new sports game every year and that’s it until they eventually try to sell it all as a bundle on Facebook Marketplace.

I know this is a steam page, but y’know.

You missed a circle.

Because you like Call of Duty so much it’s the only game you ever play? 🤷‍♂️

I hate this shit, and it really sucks because I like competitive games, and all the competitive games made since, like, 2015 have been loaded with FOMO MTX bullshit which the devs exckusively focus on while balance and bug fixes get tossed to the way side. They are banking on players having more fun spending money than actually playing a fun game.

You need to get cod because everybody has cod. Its cod. You ever told a colleague/schoolfriend/acquaintance/anyone that you like video games? Their next question is “what prestige cod are you”. Cod is love. Cod is life. Cod is the game. You’re not a loser are you?

Bro the CoD ship sailed years ago. They just don’t innovate and release the same shit year after year. Buy something else. I’d recommend Factorio.

Take a look at the reviews, and find this insanity on the top:

need to be connected to online services even when you just want to play singleplayer campaign, and keep getting connection errors.

Thanks, I’m out.

Thats the neat part, just dont.

I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Can you put a few more red circles on the photo to help? Maybe a couple arrows too.

If you still play CoD nowadays then you are actively supporting the problem.

I can’t say I like how /Games often circles around negative attention rather than positive.

Activision spent billions on marketing so people will buy these stupid Ultra Editions. Even negative attention gets people thinking about and talking about the game.

Instead, post about the cool indie games out that you think deserve far more attention than this battle pass slop. Let Activision come check up on us and cry because for all their efforts no one even cares to hate on their game.

Theres an asymmetric game out as a demo, called Carnival Hunt. It has a really unique aesthetic, and isn’t all that fun yet, in part because of the formula being refined and players getting better at it. But I like the idea: Rather than TCM’s idea of unlocking doors towards an exit, the survivors, “bunnies”, are trying to climb the floors of a large building, with each method of ascending a floor requiring various tools and making noise. Some ways up are harder to set up but easier to repeat, others only work if the killer is ignoring them.

And they don’t understand why people pirate, run away from AAA games and go for indie games instead.

They completely understand… the numbers saying that they’re making money hand over fist and the number of people who care is sadly minuscule.

These games have hit a critical mass where people will casually buy them because they’re friends are and so its a common ground game to play with buddies.

I don’t think we can ever rely on consumers pushing back on anti consumer practises because of the reality of people.

Not everyone can afford to care about every issue.

As a result, boycotts are very unlikely to work in the modern world. There is just too much all at once for any one person to care about all of them, so even if you, lets say, care about 1% (a really high estimate) of things that are wrong in the world, and are willing to act, if we extrapolated that out to the whole population, the only things that would move would need to have double digit percentages of peoples care overlapping before anything stuck.

Really, the answer is that you simply need a government that cares about its people/consumer rights.

The USA and Canada, both are very far away from having governments like that.

Europeans are a lot luckier, but yet still, there is plenty to go.

You are missing the most important issue. It only runs on Windows!